1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for measuring the quality of video data and, in particular, to a method and system for estimating the quality of pictures without referring to the source video data.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is the ultimate goal of video experts to provide most perceptually appealing video images to viewers. One way to determine whether a resulting image quality is good or poor is to ask a panel of viewers to watch certain video sequences and to give their opinions. Another way to analyze video sequences is to provide an automated mechanism to evaluate the excellence or the degradation of the video quality. To this end, various metrics are used, i.e., sharpness, blocking, ringing, clipping, noise, contrast, and temporal impairments to evaluate the overall video-quality measure. Without an objective quality metric, performing a routine assessment of video quality using formal subjective testing is time-consuming, expensive, and impossible for in-service applications.
Accordingly, the present invention proposes an objective quality assessment for still and coded video capable of measuring improvement and degradation without utilizing the source data.